The very minute the gang saw us come sloshing up to our tents, Big Jim called out, “Where on earth have you been?”
Well, we’d agreed to keep our secret a secret for awhile, anyway not to tell Barry first, but to rest of the gang—all except Tom Till. We might decide to tell John Till too, but we wouldn’t if Big Jim said not to, on account of it might spoil Tom’s vacation and he wouldn’t have any fun the rest of our camping trip.
Dragonfly answered Big Jim’s question in a mischievous voice by saying, “Bill’s been walking on my neck, and Poetry and Circus have been making soup out of me, and I am a Negro,” which wouldn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know about Crusoe, his black Man Friday and the cannibals.
As soon as we could, we changed to dry clothes, and Big Jim took command of us by saying, “O.K., boys, I’m in charge of camp for the rest of the day. Barry got a terribly important letter in the mail an hour ago, and he’s had to go to Bemidji. He’ll be back in time for our Campfire get-together.”
Well, that was that. If there was anything I liked better than anything else, it was to be alone with only our gang, when it can be its own boss, even though we all liked Barry a lot and would do anything he said any time.
“Bill’s my boss,” Dragonfly said.
I looked at Dragonfly and then at Big Jim, and winked.
Big Jim grinned back, and then said to all of us, “Let’s get the camp chores done.” Then he gave commands to different ones of us to do different things. Poetry and I had the job of burying the entrails and heads of some fish which Barry’d caught, and which had just been cleaned before he left,—that being the best thing to do with fish heads and other parts of the fish that you aren’t going to eat.
“The spade’s in Barry’s tent,” Big Jim said, and a minute later Poetry and I were on our way up along the shore to the burying place.
We hadn’t gone more than fifty yards when we heard somebody coming behind us on the run, and it was Dragonfly, with an excited face, who said, “You crazy goofs! You going to dig for the treasure without letting me go along?”